First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. D.H. Lawrence, for instance, did seven or eight drafts of The Rainbow. The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.
Bernard Malamud

Presque vu LXIX

The first thing I should warn you about is that this book is not for the politically correct or the faint-hearted or those with Anglo-Saxon attitudes. It breaks down pretty much every social convention and taboo that we in the West have been raised to believe in, and turns them on their heads. Necrophilia turns out not to be dead boring after all, but more an act of an everlasting prayer to the creator. Devouring women, withered by age and time, on creaky beds and straw mattresses in dank stables reeking of animals is the order of the day; in fact the whole process brings you closer to God. You begin to see?

The Guardian reports on five Cuban men who were arrested for infiltrating groups in the US in 1998. It was alleged that they were plotting attacks on Cuba. They have not received a fair trial and two have not seen their families in the intervening ten years.

Nine Nobel laureates, including Desmond Tutu and the German novelist Günter Grass have joined forces with others to protest the US government’s detention of the so-called Miami Five.